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VIDEO: Therapeutic drug monitoring improves IBD outcomes
SAN ANTONIO — In this video, Bincy P. Abraham, MD, MS, AGAF, FACG, Fondren Distinguished Professor in Inflammatory Bowel Disease from Houston Methodist and Weill Cornell Medical College, reviews highlights from her presentation at the American College of Gastroenterology Meeting on therapeutic drug monitoring in patients with inflammatory bowel disease.
Reactive therapeutic drug monitoring can be used to help guide treatment decisions for patients who stop responding or never respond to therapy, according to Abraham. Physicians can also proactively monitor drug levels to optimize treatment before a patient loses response.
“Now you might wonder, why bother with therapeutic drug monitoring at all where you may be able to just dose escalate or change the frequency of the drug in some of these patients,” Abraham said. “Well, we have plenty of data that looks at using therapeutic drug monitoring and proactively adjusting their dose with reactive clinical monitoring. In those cases, patients actually tend to do much better.”
Reference:
Abraham B. Therapeutic Drug Monitoring: Is It For Everyone? Presented at: American College of Gastroenterology Annual Meeting; Oct. 25-30, 2019; San Antonio.
Disclosure: Abraham reports being an advisory committee/board member for Janssen and Takeda and a consultant for Pfizer and UCB. She also reports receiving grant/research support from AbbVie, Janssen, Takeda and UCB, and speakers bureau fees from AbbVie, Janssen, Pfizer, Takeda and UCB.